King Charles Lies to Epstein Survivors After Refusing to Meet Them

King Charles III—whose brother Andrew was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein and has been accused of sexual misconduct—made no mention of the sexual predator or his victims during his joint address to Congress, even after saying that he would.

Earlier on Tuesday, HuffPost reported that Charles refused an invitation from Representative Ro Khanna to meet face to face with survivors of Epstein’s abuse, promising to instead acknowledge them during his speech. The California Democrat stated that the king “owed that to the survivors” given the mountain of controversy surrounding his brother’s actions.

“I thought it would have been an incredible moment and statement to show that it doesn’t matter how much wealth you have, how much power you have, no human being is dispensable, and that the survivors deserve justice,” Khanna said, regarding the invitation to meet with Epstein’s survivors. “He unfortunately declined that request.” A roundtable with survivors was held in Charles’s absence.

“It’s unfortunate,” Epstein survivor Sharlene Rochard told HuffPost, stating that Charles missed a real chance “to give back to just, basically, humanity, and show all the people in the U.K. and the world that he actually cares.”

Even with that rejection, Khanna still held out hope.

“I’m told he’s going to be making some statement about the survivors this afternoon in his address,” he said initially. “I hope his flunkies don’t take out the acknowledgment from his text.… I fully expect the king to be acknowledging the Epstein survivors when he speaks to our nation.”

That didn’t happen, either. Instead, Charles merely mentioned the need to “support victims of some of the ills that, so tragically, exist in both our societies today.” King Charles made time to discuss everything from the sacred U.S.-U.K. partnership to NATO, to Christianity, but he didn’t acknowledge the heinous crimes of his brother’s friend and the women who still live with the trauma of his abuse.

Epstein’s survivors have yet to comment on the king’s omission.

The White House has literally elevated Donald Trump to “king” status.

While King Charles of Britain delivered an address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday, the Trump administration was cooking up a P.R. photo to exploit the royal leader’s fleeting visit.

“TWO KINGS,” the official White House account posted on X, paired with a crown emoji as well as a photo of the king and Trump outside the Oval Office.

Charles was visiting Washington ahead of America’s 250th anniversary to encourage diplomatic relations. In a concise speech, the king spoke beyond America’s current political divide, asserting to Americans and their representatives that a U.S.-U.K. partnership is “more important” than ever and that the “challenges we face are too great for any one nation to bear alone.”

Directly addressing House Speaker Mike Johnson, Vice President JD Vance, and the present members of Congress, Charles said that “America’s words carry weight and meaning, as they have since Independence.”

“The actions of this great nation matter even more,” he continued. “President Lincoln understood this so well, with his reflection in the magisterial Gettysburg Address that the world may little note what we say, but will never forget what we do.”

But the MAGA movement—and its leader—has rarely taken care of its verbiage, let alone fretted about the consequences of its actions. The captioned image of Trump and the king is just one example that is likely to be portrayed as a joke among Trump’s political acolytes—but his allies have not shied away from opportunities to humor the alleged bit and its rhetorical attack on American democracy.

Trump referred to himself as a king in February—an odd inclusion amid a string of rants attacking New York City’s locally popular midtown congestion-pricing policy. Moments later, White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich posted an AI-generated picture of Trump wearing a jeweled crown and fur-trimmed cape. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also elevated the disturbing quip at the time, resharing Trump’s kingly comments after rubber-stamping them with a “100” emoji.

Earlier this month, Trump circulated another controversial AI-generated image on his Truth Social that painted him as Jesus Christ, cloaked in red and white robes and surrounded by light. The blasphemy seemed to be the first major instance in which the president spurred searing bipartisan backlash for his actions, prompting him to delete the post and do an about-face on the meaning of the image. He later claimed to reporters that he believed it depicted him as a doctor.

The Trump administration’s various projects to reshape the government—even the symbolic ones—are costing U.S. taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

In its latest legislative proposal, the Department of Defense has formally asked Congress to codify its rebrand as the “Department of War,” assuring it that the name change would have “no significant impact” on future spending.

Yet the military agency also acknowledged that it has already spent some $50 million in implementing the new title. The vast majority of that price tag, roughly $44.6 million, was tied to the agency’s enterprise systems, infrastructure, and administrative support, reported Inside Defense Tuesday.

That money was potentially spent in vain. While Donald Trump declared the identity switch via an executive order in September, the department’s name remains unchanged by law. Ultimately, Congress alone is responsible for the redesignation.

However, the $50 million already spent could turn out to be just a fraction of the overall cost to cast a more aggressive identity on America’s military agency. In January, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that renaming the DOD could cost as much as $125 million or more if the title was used across the entire agency.

“Costs would be at least a few million dollars if DoD phased in a minimal implementation, but they could be as large as $125 million if the name change was implemented broadly and rapidly throughout the department,” the CBO wrote at the time. “A statutory renaming could cost hundreds of millions of dollars depending on how Congress and DoD chose to implement the change.”

Despite Trump’s repeat campaign pledges to slash government spending, practically all of the MAGA leader’s sweeping government reforms have come with hidden fees. This week, Republicans began pushing their congressional colleagues to sign a $400 million check to construct Trump’s White House ballroom.

Led by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, the cohort has claimed that the space needs to be built expeditiously as a matter of national security. Citing the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday, Republicans have argued that the president is not safe without the proposed 90,000-square-foot dance hall and the attached underground military complex.

None of them have yet explained how the Secret Service—which also manned security at the Saturday night dinner—would have hypothetically fared differently at the White House location.

The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis—and then called her a “fucking bitch” moments before she died in her car—has been transferred to a different state to continue his work with the agency, as the FBI continues to supress an investigation into him.

PunchUp, The Daily Beast’s new Substack, reported that Jonathan Ross, who was only placed on three days of administrative leave for shooting Good in the arm, head, and chest, is back in both an administrative and investigative capacity, facing virtually no consequences for killing an innocent woman in broad daylight.

Department of Homeland Security officials told the outlet that ICE’s internal affairs can’t conduct its own investigation until the FBI probe ends—meaning Ross could avoid accountability for a long time to come.

The FBI’s investigation into Ross has been delayed and marked by a series of controversial moves. Six senior Justice Department officials quit in January over the department’s handling of the case, as did an FBI supervisor in the Minneapolis field office who was pushed to discontinue her civil rights probe into Ross. And while the DOJ claims that the investigation is ongoing, the only thing that’s come out of it is Ross returning to work.

Donald Trump’s picture could soon be on every new U.S. passport.

The State Department is finalizing a plan to put the president’s face in the travel document, The Bulwark reports, citing two sources with knowledge of the passport redesign, one of whom provided pictures. The new passports will include Trump’s second inaugural portrait superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, along with his signature in gold.

According to The Bulwark, there will be a “limited run” of 25,000 of these Trump passports, which are still waiting to be approved. While the current U.S. passport includes an image of Mount Rushmore, which has the heads of four presidents, this would be the first stand-alone image of a U.S. president, living or dead, in a passport. No foreign passports have included pictures of heads of state, and U.S. passports have previously carried the signature of the secretary of state, but not the president.

Trump has made a habit of putting his name on things in his second term as president, from the U.S. Institute of Peace to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He’s put banners with his face on federal buildings and created a website for prescriptions called TrumpRx.gov.

This new passport is supposedly part of the 250th anniversary of American independence, and comes as the Treasury Department hopes to produce two coins with Trump’s face on them: a $1 coin with Trump’s face on it for general circulation and a commemorative coin that would be “as large as possible.” The president seems intent on having Americans feel shame every time they open their wallet or travel overseas.